As the Heroes of the Storm closed beta rolls on and the game continues to evolve, we’d like to provide our perspective on some of the bigger topics we’ve seen discussed in the community and forums. As always, we brought in members of the development team for their insight.

TIGHTER MATCHMAKING

We’ve heard a lot of questions about the matchmaker, as players feel they are being matched up with players of much different skill levels. We’ve seen speculation that this is being done in order to force the 50% win rate mentioned in our earlier blogs. Game designer Matthew Cooper is here to shed some more light on matchmaking.

Matt: As we add more players to Heroes of the Storm, the matchmaking will continue to get tighter. It’s true that in PvP games, the ideal result of matchmaking is for all players to win 50% of their matches, but that’s not the only thing the matchmaker considers. We heavily favor matching a premade five-player team with another premade team of five. If that's not possible, we will then try a premade four, and so on. As the player pool increases, these matches will become easier for our systems to put together.

We believe that in the best matches, everyone is of roughly equivalent skill level, but that doesn’t account for situations where a player is simply having a bad match or is playing a hero they aren't familiar with, as opposed to just being a less-skilled player overall. We’ll continue monitoring and evaluating matchmaking to improve the experience for everyone.

On another note, our matchmaker is a constantly evolving feature and we have plans to continue improving its ability to pair players and teams in a fair environment. We are actively working on improvements to the system and will continue to share them in a public setting as they are completed. Please continue to share your feedback as we move forward through the beta.

IMPROVING PERFORMANCE

Next, lead software engineer Andy Bond discusses the process of making stability and performance improvements in Heroes of the Storm.

Andy: We are working hard on improving Heroes of the Storm on lots of different fronts, and we appreciate the community’s excitement and dedication to the game. All the feedback we’ve received has been instrumental in our goals of making the best experience possible. One of our primary focuses is currently on stability and performance. With our February 10 release, we’ve seen a significant reduction in the number of reported game client crashes, especially memory-related, but there’s more room for improvement.

Memory Usage and 32-bit vs. 64-bit

We have seen community members recommending other players switch to the 32-bit client, although the primary difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit game clients is the amount of memory allocated (64-bit allocates more memory to start and is allowed to “grow” into more memory usage than 32-bit). In conjunction with our crash reports and research, this suggests that players with less physical RAM—or with physical RAM issues exposed by high physical memory usage—may benefit the most from switching to the 32-bit client.

With our next release, we are introducing smaller physical memory caps for both the 32-bit and 64-bit clients (64-bit will still allocate more to begin with and grow larger than 32-bit). This should mitigate some memory-related issues and make the 64-bit client a more trusted option, even for PCs with less physical RAM.

Memory Leaks

We have also seen speculation from the community about memory leaks. We’ve been investigating these reports and have done extensive testing, but have yet to find any evidence that indicates that’s what’s going on. However, we will continue to look at this issue, and we welcome any additional information players may have—especially reproducible data or steps related to uncontained memory growth while loading the same maps, Heroes, mounts, and skins in subsequent games. For now, it’s normal for Heroes’ memory usage to grow from match to match as new maps, Heroes, mounts, and skins are loaded.

Network Spike Indicator

With our next release, we will be removing the “Network spikes” metric from the Ctrl-Alt-F performance menu. Currently, we believe it aggregates a couple types of performance metrics in a potentially misleading way, which can cause confusion about network performance issues versus other types of performance issues. Among our current performance initiatives, we are working on some new and simpler performance metrics to replace the concept of “Network spikes,” which are planned to go live in an upcoming update and should help players better pinpoint the causes of certain common performance issues.

LET’S BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER

Combating toxicity is a topic we see brought up on a daily basis. A number of players would love to see more options to deal with those who ruin the game experience by trolling, using inappropriate language, making aggressive real life threats, or just being generally unpleasant. Matthew Cooper is back to chime in on the topic.

Matt: Toxicity is a problem in Heroes of the Storm, and just like in nearly every other multiplayer game, in comments on articles on the Internet, and out in the real world, it’s a tough problem to solve. Playing nice and playing fair is something we take seriously at Blizzard, and we all agree it isnot okay to be disrespectful to other players in any Blizzard game.

At PAX East, Dustin Browder touched on some of what we’ve been considering to address the issue, including the Mute Allies function, Clans, and individual Rating Systems, but we’re still exploring ways to tackle this in the most effective way, as we truly want playing Heroes to be a positive experience for everyone. With that in mind, we’re most interested in ideas that focus on promoting good behavior, and we’re listening to your feedback as we work to figure out the best solution.

In the end, we feel like the best Heroes experience possible is the one you get when playing with a full group. Our goal is to foster an environment where even players without a full party of friends in Quick Match and Hero League can have similarly pleasant experiences.

Thanks to Matt Cooper, Andy Bond, and others for taking time out of their day to discuss these topics. We aim to continue addressing community concerns in the future, so be sure to keep providing feedback!

There are some very encouraging thoughts in there on memory usage optimization, network spikiness, and of course the ongoing debate about how to solve toxicity in-game. Kudos to the Heroes team for continuing to be highly accessible and providing constant communication on these subjects.

The Heroes Design team is looking for feedback on the latest Nexus Anomaly, the current thinking is to keep the Core changes permanently because they add unique flavor and cool moments to games, and this post focuses on the more controversial changes that have gone live for Structures, mainly Tower aggro.
Main Highlights
The team initially decided to pull out all of the Tower aggro changes in preparation for the next Anomaly, as they didn't think they were right for the game.
Once they removed the system, they started receiving feedback from across the team that this was the wrong decision, and that Tower aggro changes made the game feel better.
Left undecided, the Design team is currently looking for feedback, because they need to make a call soon, but they are not 100% sure what to do now.
Would you like the Tower aggro changes permanently added to the game?
(Source)
Hello fellow Heroes!
The Heroes Design team has been hard at work on our next seasonal content, including deciding what to do with the Call for Help Nexus Anomaly. We’re looking for feedback, and we wanted to take the time to give you some heavy insight into our thoughts, so strap yourselves in, this is going to be a doozy!
Firstly, we have already decided that we like what the changes to the Kings Core have brought to our game, and we want to keep those. We believe they give our maps a unique flavor and they add some cool moments to games. This article will be focused solely on the more controversial changes that were made to Towers, Forts, and Keeps in regards to how they interact with enemy Heroes. We think a good place to start is with what our goals were when we changed the Tower Aggro system.
We had two major goals with the system:
We wanted players to feel like their Towers were “smart” about how they tried to protect members of their team. We have heard lots of feedback over the years that it’s frustrating that Towers will prioritize a nearby minion while an allied Hero is being attacked, and that this felt unintuitive, resulting in players being upset with their own structures for not helping them out.
We wanted to create more interesting back and forth gameplay between Heroes in both Tower diving and town defense situations. Before this change, the defending team’s counter-play was to try to cast AoE abilities on enemy Minions so that they would die, effectively enabling their Towers to target the diving Heroes and protect them.
We want to also point out that while the first point may not seem like much, it is a fairly big deal, and was the initial primary motivator for changing Tower aggro. It’s important when playing games that they “feel” right, and when they don’t it can be a big deterrent to player enjoyment. It’s why we spend a lot of time and effort on high quality visual effects, sound effects, models, animations, and creating counter-play through proper design. It’s all related, and we believe that games become great works of art when things feel like they’re all working together in a cohesive and awesome way.
Where We Are
Let’s talk about how we feel about where things currently stand. We had recently made the decision to pull out all of the Tower aggro changes, and our recent playtests have had them removed in preparation for the next Anomaly. The team didn’t feel that it was a clear enough win due to some design concerns which we will discuss later, and due to how controversial the changes have been overall. We’re committed to only keeping Anomalies that we truly believe are better for the game as a whole, and since we were also incredibly torn on this issue, we had decided to remove it.
Then something interesting happened. Once we had removed the system, we started getting feedback from across the team that this was the wrong decision, and that the Tower aggro changes, although they had some issues, made the game, overall, feel much better. We ourselves also noticed that the games just felt better with the system on, which caused us to go back and ask ourselves: “are we making the right decision by taking this away?”
After lots of debate, we’re still torn on the how we want to proceed. We need to make a call soon, so we’re asking for some feedback from you to help us decide. In the next and final section of this post, we’re going to outline what we like about the current system, what we don’t like, and some proposed changes to improve the system if we decide to keep it.
What We Like
We believe we succeeded in Towers feeling smarter as a defending player. They “feel” like they’re doing what they should be
We believe we’ve created cool, high-tension moments when enemy Heroes dive under a Tower. We also like how attackers have some ability to manipulate who gets the Tower aggro to make intelligent, coordinated plays. We believe this can be even better with improvements in the future
The combination on our end of being able to manipulate Tower damage and the stacking Armor debuff gives us a lot of room to manipulate exactly how we want these interactions to feel going forward, and gives us good tuning knobs to decide how much defensive power is from the Tower itself or from the nearby enemy Heroes who are there to defend it
Issues With The Current System
We believe Towers are currently too punishing to consistently create the cool, high-tension moments we described above. They currently hit too hard to make those moments happen as often or as long as we’d like them to
Many players don’t like how much they have to change their behavior when near enemy Towers, particularly the ones near the Gates, mainly due to splash damage inadvertently causing Towers to attack them
A lot of the map is now more dangerous than before, making it less possible to fight enemy Heroes, particularly in the early game. This exacerbates issues we already have with our desire to make the laning phase of the game more interesting
When too powerful (which we believe it currently is), it disincentivizes players from pushing with their map objectives, which can make those moments feel less awesome
Some players just like the way things have been for years, and don’t want such a large change to a fundamental aspect of the game. While not a commanding reason to never make changes, it is something we always try to keep in mind, and why we think the bar needs to be high in order to keep these kinds of fundamental changes to game systems
Now that we’ve covered where we’re at, here are some potential ideas that we have been debating to help make things better if we decide to keep the changes. We could end up doing none of these or all of them, and we’re open to other ideas from you!
Change all structures to prioritize Map Objectives before anything else
Pros
It would fix players not wanting to push with Map Objectives
Cons
It adds another rule that can be unintuitive for the defending players since they will not always be defended by their Towers, only most of the time, which can be confusing and goes against the primary goal of Towers “feeling” smart in how they work
Towers don’t defend their teammates in the moments of the game when they need them most
Change Tower aggro so that the front Towers prioritize Minions, but the Forts, Keeps, and Kings Core prioritize Heroes who attack other Heroes
Pros
The early game would better reward aggression and pushing, and less of the map would be as dangerous as it currently is with the new system
Players could attack gates without feeling like their splash damage could get them into trouble
Cons
It adds complexity to the game with two different Aggro rules depending on the Structure
Lower the damage that Structures do to Heroes
Pros
Towers won’t be as directly threatening themselves, which mitigates the issue of them being too punishing in the early game
Players will have more time to be aggressive with Tower diving and less immediately punished when Towers initially start to shoot them
It puts the onus of properly defending towns more on the defending team, which incentivizes interaction between heroes
Cons
It makes Towers weaker, which could result in Tower diving being too prevalent.
These are our thoughts on the current Anomaly. Thanks again for taking the time to read through our ideas. We’re now looking for feedback on how you feel about the current system, whether or not you would like to go back to the old system and why, or other ideas on how to improve the current one. We want to make a choice in the near future about what to do, so please be a Hero and give us your feedback – it will greatly help us in our tireless pursuit of constantly improving this game that we all love playing together.

While there are no plans to bring back Haunted Mines at this time, reddit user RockNerd33 did a drum cover of the original Haunted Mines soundrack for everyone to enjoy.
For illustration, here's the original Haunted Mines Soundtrack if you haven't heard it yet.
(Source)

Our twenty-ninth Heroes of the Storm Meta Tier list for the month of December is here!
The latest meta tier list for December 2019 is here!
Welcome to another Icy Veins's Meta Tier List for the December 3 patch. The goal of this list is to try and detail game's current metagame state. The prime goal of such lists is to inform players regarding popular and trending team composition drafting strategies (i.e. the drafting metagame).
Using the list

Current ranked mode map rotation

Current anomaly
Experience Globes. For more information about this Anomaly, simply refer to our Anomaly guide.

Blizzard released two new skins for Cassia and Tracer yesterday, but that did not stop community members from submitting their own skin concepts that are very well worth checking out! Here's Messenger Kharazim and Hades Ragnaros.

Messenger Kharazim by Yasemin Baran (Source)

Hades Ragnaros by Evangelos Callow (Source)
Latest Heroes of the Storm News
Heroes of the Storm Balance Patch: May 6th
Mythic Pantheon Skins Now Live